The Crazy English Language

For some reason, people around the world are learning English to a degree unprecedented in history, to a degree that the number of English second-language speakers now exceeds the number of native speakers. Thanks to the worldspanning influence of the British Empire and the United States, and with major English-speaking countries found on almost every continent, English has become a lingua franca to a degree that French could only have dreamt of back in the day. Hundreds of millions of people are learning English... you almost have to wonder if they're gluttons for punishment.

Yes, yes, I know the value of English, particularly in terms of its widespread nature meaning that people from diverse areas are likely now to have it in common. But that doesn't change the fact that it is English, this ramshackle, kludged-together contraption of nouns and adverbs that hangs together with spit and prayer and bailing wire. Tens of millions of native speakers don't appreciate this, because the flipside of English's new universality is that it gives native speakers a reason to remain unilingual - why go to all the effort of twisting your brain around some other language, when so many of its speakers are likely as not already learning yours? This is a significant problem, especially in North America - English Canada's relations with Quebec and the United States' positions on Mexican immigration might not be as fraught if more of the majority spoke the language of the minority.

Still, learning another language doesn't solely involve maneuvering your mind to pick up the ins and outs of how it works; the same process happens with your own, giving you the opportunity to see your native language from more of an outsider's perspective.

English of the 1920s - remarkably little language drift since then!

I've recently renewed my attempts to learn Japanese through language exchange as well as textbooks, which means that I use my shaky grasp of my native language to help someone else learn it, and they in turn help me out with their native Japanese. So far, one of the greatest attractions I've found with Japanese is its simplicity in comparison to the Romance languages; there are only two tenses, many things don't have to be stated once it's obvious what you're talking about, and words aren't gendered! Not like in languages like French, where you have to remember whether or not a desk or a pencil is masculine or feminine. Even when the class had a talking pineapple on VHS to help us out, trying to get down the whole je/tu, il/elle, nous/vous, ils/elles thing in French represented a huge barrier of entry to me in my elementary and high school classes.

English's weirdnesses aren't necessarily as obvious. I certainly would never have thought about them if it hadn't fallen to me to explain them. For example, take the following sentences: "While hiking in the woods I encountered a bear" versus "I encountered a bear while hiking in the woods."

My Japanese exchange partner expressed confusion that these two sentences had exactly the same meaning, to the extent that I had to ask around at work the next day to make sure they did have the same meaning, and I wasn't just moving bad freight. I couldn't even explain at first why they were the same! These are things that a native speaker doesn't need to consciously know; after being brought up in the language, surrounded by it, native speakers understand and speak it less through education than by a sort of socially-inculcated instinct, no matter what language it is - I would imagine mostly, though, for people who are brought up unilingual.

Beyond that, there's English's array of modifiers, "on" and "by" and "of" and "with" and so on, used in differing ways from sentence to sentence and generally only known to be right by native speakers because it sounds right. Confronting something like that head-on forces you to appraise it in an entirely new way. With another native speaker, you might just say "don't talk like that, it's wrong" - when it comes to a learner, that doesn't go far enough. You have to know the rules before you can start breaking them with confidence.

The English language, as it stands today, is a premier example of evolution in action - memetic evolution, certainly, but many of the same factors still apply. English is not even close to being an ideal language - the fact that that word isn't spelled "langwij" is just one piece of evidence for that - just like the human body is not even close to being ideal for a species of thinking, industrial beings like ourselves. It doesn't need to be ideal; it just needs to work sufficiently well, just like the reverse wiring in the human eye. The English language is a memeplex that has evolved piecemeal over a thousand years and more, incorporating bits and pieces from here and there, working well enough to be understood and lucky enough to be piggybacking on peoples that bent the world to their will.

That doesn't change the fact that, also like humanity, it's a miracle that English managed to get anywhere at all.

Learning to Read, Again

I don't remember what it was like to not be able to read English; I can't remember that far back. I know from what I've been told that I started reading simple things as far back as preschool and never stopped. I kind of wish I did recall that experience now, because without that knowledge the next thing I can fall back on is the conviction that I must be able to learn to read, since I've already done it once.

Read Japanese, that is. Recently I've had Japan on the brain, and this has manifested in actual academic study of the Japanese language through the University of British Columbia's continuing education program. Despite my failed attempts to sign on with the JET Programme at the end of my university days, I never had a real opportunity to study the language in Ontario. Right now I'm capable of extremely basic conversation, but speaking a language is only part of it - if you can't also read it, you'd better be a pretty good bluffer if you have to spend any significant amount of time in a society that speaks it.

You've probably heard that Japanese doesn't use an alphabet natively. Instead, it uses two syllabaries, hiragana and katakana, as well as kanji, an array of Chinese logographic characters of which up to three thousand or so are in common use in Japan. The familiar Western alphabet isn't unknown over there, though - it's called romaji, is often used in a Japanese context on things like street and destination signs, identification, and computer interfaces, and it's taught in the schools. So, even if a Japanese tourist visited Canada with only a limited command of English, written material wouldn't be completely unfamiliar.

The reverse is, unfortunately, not the same. I've heard rumors that some high schools in British Columbia offer Japanese as an elective language class, but otherwise it's pretty much no dice unless you attend a university with a sufficiently sophisticated languages department. Neither is there a particularly strong presence of Japanese writing in Canada, so far as I've noticed. Not even my package of authentic miso soup has any. The result of this was that when I started trying to learn hiragana and katakana, they were completely alien systems that bore no resemblance at all to anything I'd ever seen or heard of before.


Over the course of a few weeks I did manage to eventually wrestle katakana to the ground, but for a while there it was a struggle that would leave my mind blank at the most inconvenient moments. Hiragana presents its own challenge that I still have yet to take on squarely, and kanji... there's a lot of kanji. But it would've been considerably simpler, I think, if this had been the sort of thing that I'd been exposed to through society during the course of my life.

In retrospect, in some ways it's almost surprising that there wasn't very much of this. Back in the 1980s, when I was growing up, one of the dominant cultural assumptions in the West was that Japan was going to rule the world thanks to the unrelenting power of its keiretsu megacorporations - the bursting of the economic bubble put an end to that particular assumption, but even so. In other ways, though, it's not surprising at all - until very recently, Western culture in general was rather provincial and xenophobic against anything that wasn't considered to be a subset of "the West." Sure, there are sushi and pho places on practically every street corner now, but twenty years ago the situation was vastly different.

So I'll continue learning. Nevertheless, I can't help but look at photographs of subway station signs from all across Japan, seeing their names given in kanji and romaji both, and wondering why not even the SkyTrain does the same in reverse. I mean, they're replacing the signage anyway. Sometimes, the will to read comes from the most unlikely places.